Ellen Weis, San Francisco's Museum of Modern Mythology

Consumerism fuels the capitalist fire. In a capitalist society, the goal is to make money, by whatever means possible, exploiting whichever potential weakness that might exist. The human race is one with a wild imagination, and this wild imagination, though a great strength, can, like all great strengths, serve as a potential weakness.

It is our imaginations that advertising exploits, and it is our imaginations that religion and myth traditionally played the role of satiating, telling stories that have morals to them, lessons to be learned. Now consumerism fulfills this role. The consumer ideology serves as the golden rule, advertising serves as sermons, products serve as our idoltry, and just as religion instills faith at an early age, so too does consumerism.

Ellen Weis (qtd. in "Advertising Characters" 1997) speaks from the perspective of one who is an authority on mythology. Her analogy between religion and consumerism is an accurate one. Undoubtedly, she's referring to this role that consumerism is playing in stimulating our imaginations. It does t

The perfect marriage between consumerism and religion can be found in the myth of Santa Claus. As if the celebration of the birth of Christ wasn't quite enough, a new character had to be born, one specifically oriented toward children, one that is more expendible and mysterious. This is religion for children, replacing toys for Heaven, Santa Claus for God, reindeer for angels, and a naughty and nice list for punishing sin. It's difficult to sell Heaven to children because they live much more in the present than do adults, but toys they want, and toys provide instant gratification: they can see the results of their behavior on Christmas morning. But most of all, the increased need for toys to supply for this myth provides a tenfold increase in profits. The effect doesn't stop there but trickles down into the economy for the entire lives of those children, for once a child learns the love for toys, they will always love toys, more expensive and exotic though they may be. Whereas a child might have miniature-sized cars for toys, when they get older they have full-sized cars for toys. If consumerism is our religion, then Christmas would be our religious holiday, now representing both our worship for products as well as our worship of Christ.

Such reassurance almost takes the place of people actually being Good Samaritans themselves. While they themselves seem less than perfect, they can always look to this image of kindness and project onto it their fears of their race being a total abomination of God and be reassured by it. Such projection onto material objects seems almost a religious necessity. Since they cannot have the actual Buddha or the actual Christ, for example, sitting in front of them, they instead meditate or pray to a sacred idol which represents their savior. This sort of idoltry is exactly what consumerism offers. People seek happiness, acceptance, nobility, and love, and since these attributes seem so hard to come by in America, they instead substitute for them the products that represent them, which seem much easier to come by. In fact, they require nothing more than a trip to the market.

For example, nearly every cigerette ad features a picture of an ideal person smoking their brand, ideal at least by the standards of most people who long to be accepted. For women, the smoker typically has long blonde hair, a beautiful smile, and perfect, white teeth. The ads that best demonstrates this are those for Virginia Slims. For men you have Marlboro with the infamous "Marlboro man," who is a rugged, handsome loner out in the countryside with his horse and campfire. The ads seem to say, "this could be you."

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Approximate Word count = 1778
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)